Jordan

From 106 the land east of the Jordan was the Roman province of Arabia, governed from Bostra and dating its documents by its own provincial era, while the deep south was later detached as Palaestina Tertia; the Decapolis cities — Gerasa, Philadelphia, Gadara — had struck their own bronze under Rome before that. By late antiquity the money that mattered was the gold solidus, cut seventy-two to the Roman pound in near-pure metal and held to that standard for some seven centuries, with its third, the tremissis, for smaller sums. The archive of this territory is not on parchment but underfoot. Hundreds of church and chapel pavements from the fourth to the eighth centuries carry Greek mosaic inscriptions, a remarkable share of them dated by the provincial era, naming the bishop of the day, the donors who paid, and now and then the mosaicist who set the tesserae; few places anywhere have so much dated late-antique epigraphy still in position. What those floors record is who gave and when. What they withhold, almost without exception, is how much — so for actual sums the best evidence is often the pilgrims who came through and wrote down what they saw.

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Making a film here? The Canada–Jordan corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.

The Imperial Treasury’s Annual Stipend to Each Monk at a Church on the Lower Jordan c.518

Writing about the year 518, the pilgrim author of De situ Terrae Sanctae known as Theodosius described a church standing beside the Jordan below Jericho and set down what the men who served it were paid: each monk resident there drew six solidi a year from the imperial treasury for his livelihood. This is a maintenance stipend rather than a fee for a made thing — what the late Roman state reckoned it cost to keep one man at his post in a remote place, year on year — and one of the few surviving figures for the running cost of a religious house rather than its construction. Theodosius gives the rate per man and not the size of the community, so the sum recorded here is one monk’s annual support. It needs no conversion arithmetic: the solidus was struck seventy-two to the Roman pound in near-pure gold and held that standard for centuries.

27.3g

Theodosius, De situ Terrae Sanctae, composed c. 518; Geyer, Paul, ed. Itinera Hierosolymitana saeculi IIII–VIII, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 39 (Vienna, 1898); Wilkinson, John. Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades. (Aris & Phillips, 1977); University of Oxford, The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, record E02524.